[Editor's note: Half left takes a look at the Source engine for his A Time to Build Monthly Musing. -- CTZ]

For this month’s Monthly Musing, I intended to talk about Halo 3’s forge but after thinking that no doubt countless others would have chosen that (Editor's note: No one has yet!) I decided to go down another route and with the Software Development Kit for Valve's Source engine.

First of all what is the Source SDK? Well it pretty much does what it says on the tin. It is a tool or rather, a set of tools that allows the user to develop some software for the Source engine. Primarily maps and mods. It is free to download and can be found in the ‘tools’ section of your steam account. 

The Source SDK truly unlocks the potential of the Source engine and enables anyone to come up with the most amazing things. I myself have had many a frolic within the ‘Hammer’ map maker tool provided by the SDK and constructed some tricky maps. Unfortunately, my creativity and patience is lacking and they all turned into large grey cubes to mess around in with my Portal gun. Also, I never got the hand of the buttons seen in ‘Portal’. My button activated doors would often just slide forward whilst still shut, in a pathetically useless manner.

“But half’ surely a simpleton such as yourself cannot use such a complicated toolset as hammer!”


Shut up, idiot. Hammer’s UI is very well set out and even the most basic user can make simple map geometries and place objects from everyone’s favourite Source games. Who wouldn't love a father Grigori continually preaching to a congregation of Portal turrets and WCCs. God that would be awesome.


I feel that mods made by gamers are a very important part of the progression of games and how games are built. They are raising the bar for developers to come up with more creative and inventive games. And when developers provide players with tools such as the SDK, it leads the way for a new generation of developers to arise. Many of the games I play are doubtlessly being constructed by the people who spent many hours of their lives constructing Quake, Warcraft and Marathon maps all because the developers were wise enough to enable the players to use their own imagination to come up with their own ideas and put them into practice.

Indeed, many of our favourite modern games originated from Source mods. After being conceived on Quake's engine, Team Fortress became Team Fortress Classic, which was then available as a mod for the GoldSource engine; the engine on which the original Half-Life ran.

Here are some examples of Soure mods:

Minerva is a story based series of content set within the HL2 universe in which the player helps the mods namesake try and find out some of the Covenants plans on Earth.


Source Forts is a multiplayer mod in which two teams can build and invade forts constructed by their own Gravity Guns.


Zombie Panic is another popular Source mod in which players can infect one another in a mad scramble for survival. And perhaps the early footings of Vales latest venture: Left 4 Dead?


Source has even enabled fans to upgrade that which they love with the Source engine’s superior graphics and especially its physics engine.

And of course, I couldn’t get through a piece talking about the Source engine without mentioning Garry’s mod, which in itself could even be considered a set of modding tools. It allows players to create all sorts of contraptions and map set pieces. The add-ons for Garry’s mod further give power to the player, wire mod in particular is extremely powerful in the things that it can do.